Churchill's D-Day
Americans tend to remember only the U.S. role at D-Day, but British (and Canadian) troops also came ashore in Normandy on June 6, 1944. With Britain as the staging area for the invasion of Nazi-held Europe, D-Day required the cooperation of the country’s prime minister, Winston Churchill. In historical fiction as well as history, Churchill has sometimes been cast as an obstructionist.
In Churchill’s D-Day, a pair of British military historians take issue with that claim. They argue that Churchill was supportive of the invasion—if worried. After all, he had presided over Gallipoli, a catastrophically failed amphibious invasion of Turkey during World War I. But according to the authors, Churchill fretted mainly over details of logistics, and minimizing the potential for an Allied bloodbath.
Churchill’s D-Day is an authorized account—coauthor Allen Packwood is director of the Churchill Archival Center—but the book acknowledges the prime minister’s errors of political judgement, leading to his defeat in the 1945 general election, and his (conventional for his generation) attitudes toward race and imperialism. Churchill was wrong on many points, but his vigorous defense of Britain was crucial in defeating the evil of Nazism.
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